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How to Kill a Cyborg Dinosaur

This short story was done as a writing challenge to go with this image posted on SciFi Ideas.com.

The cadets reacted variously, some showing clear respect and awe for the massive dreadnought, others trying to work out strategies.

Denver just laughed. She continued to laugh, until enough of the cadets noticed and stopped what they were doing to stare at her.

“Rooks,” she finally said to them, “you gotta learn to pay more attention in briefings. Look at that thing.” The cadets mostly turned to glance, quickly, at the advancing T-Rex, before turning back to their Sergeant. Denver read their faces, and laughed again.

“Look at you! You look at that critter, and all you see is teeth! Guys… what DON’T you see?”

A few of the cadets looked again, briefly, and looked back in confusion. The others waited for Denver to finish.

“You don’t see its eyes, do you? Or its ears? Even its olfactory systems are being rechanneled through that helmet. It’s being totally driven by its electronics.”

At which point, Denver reached into her gear pouch and removed a single grenade. Hefting it idly, she smiled. “And what’s the one thing you know about electronics, rooks?”

Finally one of the cadets smiled back, and reached for his shut-off switch. “They don’t like EM pulses!”

“Right.” With that, Denver tossed the grenade a few inches in the air, caught it with a slap in her palm, and curled her fingers around it meaningfully. She pitched it at the T-Rex’s head, not bothering to see if the other cadets would be fast enough on the take to hit the emergency shut-downs on their own gear (and a few of them were heard to mutter a hasty “Oh, shit!” before reaching for their switches).

The grenade went off against the dinosaur’s head, a flash-bulb pop of light and a palpable pulse that they could all feel in their bones. The T-Rex flinched from the surprise, then bellowed… then froze, realizing it was now deaf, blind and scent-disabled.

Denver waved an arm at the T-rex, and used her other arm to pull her rifle forward and hit the charger. “And I think you know what to do with it now… right, rooks?”

Finally, the cadets smiled, and their smiles looked as feral and satisfied as her own. They unlimbered their rifles.